Turquoise Sweater

I’ve been wanting to make a wide sleeve, long narrow cuff sweater for a while. But the search on Ravelry didn’t want to provide me with sweater options that I liked, so I continued looking. Eventually I stumbled on a 30s sweater pattern from Etsy that looked promising. I purchased it and promptly found out that it wasn’t as helpful as I’d hoped. The instructions don’t say anything about the ribbing that’s used in the pattern images, for example.

In the end I settled on dyeing four skeins of crazy eight dk yarn with spruce and teal, plus some black speckles. The original patterns requires you to knit the bottom hem first, and then increase to the front and back panel, same with sleeves, cuff first and then increase. However, when I started this sweater I didn’t have a ribber attachment for my knitting machine yet, so I started with the back panel above the hem. I’d figure out how to do the hem later.

The front, back and sleeve panels are basically the same. With the only difference being that the the front panel needed to be cast off sooner than the others. Presumably for a lower neckline in the front. After having knit those four giant panels, I only had about 40 grams of yarn leftover. That didn’t seem like it would ever be enough, so I dyed another skein. This one turned out a little lighter, so it was good that I was only supposed to use it for the hems and cuffs.

I have since also acquired a ribbing attachment for the knitting machine and set about learning how to do the cuffs. It took a few tries, but it’s definitely quicker and more even than hand knitting. I kitchenered the ribbed sections to the corresponding body parts and left sections open for buttons. The overlapping edge gets stitches picked up in a regular interval, where some stitches are not picked up on purpose for the button holes. Then a garter edge is knit for some stability. Buttons are attached on the other edge and that allows all buttons to be functional.

I decided to increase the neckline height at the front to the same level als the sleeves and back piece. I still don’t know how they expected things to line up with them not being the same height. But fine. It’s now done, and I really love the colour – it doesn’t show up on camera accurately at all, but in person it’s great! It wears well, even if the sleeves are somehow just a little bit too short.